What Happens When You Don't Vote

I usually try to get back to the Commonwealth once a year. I've lived for the past 30 years in the same part of England to which two other Virginia women, Pocahontas (my kinswoman) and Nancy Astor, were condemned; and so I feel that if I don't wiggle my toes in some Old Dominion dirt at least once a year, I'll be pushing up daisies in Brit dirt along with Mrs Rolfe and Lady Astor.

But in 2009, I came home twice, the second time,expressly to vote in the state gubernatorial election. Not that my vote did any good - I voted for Creagh Deeds: nice man, weak candidate.

Virginians have a particularly mad habit of saying one thing and doing another (which drives my English husband around the bend). The real Democratic candidate in 2009 should have been Terry McAuliffe, a clintonista, but a Democrat, nonetheless. However, Virginians balked at a Carpetbagger running for the state's highest office. So what did they do?

They elected a Carpetbagger ... and a Republican.

But this wasn't just any old Carpetbagger ... Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Reconstruction, for the certain dynamics in the South, would have been heaven on a plate if all the occupying Yankees had been like Lil'Bob McDonnell!

First, he wrote a doctoral thesis, basically saying women should be barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen and submissive to their husband. Lil'Bob tried to brush this away as a youthful indiscretion, but fact was, when he wrote this (for his post-graduate degree at the religious playschool known as Regent University), he was already a married man with a wife (maybe not barefoot, but certainly in the kitchen and pregnant a lot) and in his mid-thirties.

When does "youthful" cease to be "youthful?"

Then, there was this little matter which unfurled during the McDonnell campaign (and at a gun booth as well!)

And then, after all was said and done, one of the first things Lil'Bob did as governor was to insert one cultural foot into his mouth and shove.

Look, we don't need any kind of reminder that the Civil War - that's right, I said the Civil War, not the War Between the States or even the War of Northern Aggression - happened. Hell, we're Southern; as Faulkner says, in the South, the past isn't even past. But, Lordy, someone should have told Lil'Bob that the Civil War ended in 1865. We lost. Get over it. (And, pssst! The war was all about slavery.)

But, you see, Lil'Bob should be all over that shit. Because he won. To the victor, the spoils, and all that.

Our problem is that we got a Carpetbagger of the Chris Matthews variety, from Chris's same area nad neighbourhood around Philadelphia. You know, the spittle-flecked type. The sorts who "forget" a black person is black if he or she is the right kind of black person. For Chris Matthews, that's Barack Obama; for Lil'Bob, that's Sheila Johnson of BET.

Lately, Lil'Bob's latest trick is coyly sponsoring draft legislation which heavily regulate the Commonwealth's abortion clinics.

Anti-abortion advocates have been pushing for two decades to impose new regulations that would treat abortion clinics as ambulatory surgery centers and require that they meet hospital-type regulations. They say such rules will make Virginia clinics safer for women because they will no longer be treated like doctor’s offices.

The regulations require the same strict physical requirements as outpatient surgical centers that would be doing complex and invasive surgery, abortion rights activists said. The new requirements are based on dozens of pages of guidelines for health-care facilities published by the Facility Guidelines Institute, a nonprofit group.

(Pssst again! For "nonprofit group," read "conservative family values.")

Now, I certainly didn't vote for Lil'Bob McDonnell, whom many people in the Republican party and the media are now touting as possible Vice Presidential material; but I can easily see how some people in the media, who didn't know any better, might lump Lil'Bob in with all the other raving lunatice fundamentalist Pentecostal types who charm snakes, speak in tongues and believe we are in End Times - people like Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry.

In fact, Joan Walsh is going into meltdown on Rick Perlstein's Facebook wall about Jimmy Carter, trying to curry favour with Perlstein by lumping what these myopic media elitist wannabes perceive to be Carter's conservatism, likening it to his Baptist religion - Southern, protestant and fundamentalist. Walsh even concludes that a good enough reason for Carter hatred is the fact that Michele Bachmann formerly supported him in another life.

(Well, Joan's gal, Hillary Clinton, started out a Goldwater babe, and once upon a time Rick Perry was not only Al Gore's BFF, but his campaign manager, so do we hate these people too?)

I'm sure Joan would like to lump Lil'Bob into that pejorative pack of Dominionists too, except that she can't because he's not.

Lil'Bob belongs to Joan Walsh's ethnic and religious dynamic. Begorrah! He's an Irish Catholic lad from a working class neighbourhood in Philadelphia. Like Joan. Like Tweety.

Recently, Lil'Bob addressed the graduating class at my alma mater, the University of Virginia. It brought back memories of when I took my degree there. That was in 1976, the bicentenniel year. A Republican was in the White House. Jimmy Carter was running for President. The governor was Mills Godwin, who was elected as a Democrat, but who converted to the GOP halfway through his tenure. I remember when he was introduced, my mother told me the audience had to stand, and they did. All except my father, who remained in his seat, with his right hand raised and clenched in a fist, except of the stiff middle finger.

But that was then, and this is now. McDonnell gave the graduating class some timeworn, if not trite advice, which, upon reading this, seems adverse to his Republican principles:-

Follow the Golden Rule. Do unto others, as you'd have them do unto you. Help and serve your neighbor. Be kind and generous to others. Take responsibility for others, and make no excuses. Give back to your community generously. Live today well. Do not worry about tomorrow ... Always vote ...

Eh?

That sounds positively Democratic. In fact, it sounds liberal to the point of socialistic. So socialistic, that I almost wonder if Lil'Bob meant, at the end, that these kids should just vote, as in "just do it," or that they should vote for the GOP?

Who knows? This is the enigma about Bob McDonnell. His policies stink, but he's never been anything less than respectful to the President - moreso than a lot of politicos and pundits from our blue side of the fence. He dismissed birtherism as nonsense and said people should focus on the President's policies and not his character. He's taken government money and publically thanked the President for any help and aid offered the Commonwealth.

Do I want to see McDonnell out of the Statehouse? Yes. I'm bloody glad he's only got one term, and I'm counting the days. Do I want to see him out of politics? Goes without saying. And I certainly don't want to see him on a GOP ticket in 2012 or even heading one in 2016; but Bob McDonnell is what happens to a state when people can't be assed to go to the polls and vote, for whatever reason.

However, I have to say that Virginia could have come off worse in this situation. At the end of the day, Bob McDonnell is no Scott Walker.

Let's All Be Thankful for Bob McDonnell

In the wake of the governor of my home state literally making Virginia the whipping boy for the nation’s collective guilt still felt about racism, I’d like to say a few words regarding this.
First of all, I did not vote for Bob McDonnell. Bob McDonnell does not speak for me. I did not authorise him to have my mandate. Neither did 44% of the people in Virginia who voted last November. That said, I did vote. In fact, I got my ass on a transatlantic flight and timed a holiday so that I would have a chance to pop by the polling booth that Tuesday morning and cast my Democratic vote; but a lot of people who lived in the state, simply couldn’t be assed to do so.
The day before the election, a politically astute friend of mine called it correctly. Deed would lose, he said, because the two demographics who ensured that the state went blue in 2008, simply didn’t intend to turn up at the polls – and those were the first-time voters (aged 18-24, specifically) and the African-Americans, many of whom – including Sheila Johnson of BET – were supporting McDonnell. The indendent tranche went red as well.
This entire election was a prelude of the Massachusetts senatorial election two months later; and as much as the media and the usual suspects whose agenda it is to ensure this Presidency fails (the Hamshers in bed with Grover Norquist and Whoreanna Fuckington), would like us to believe that both elections were an indictment of the President and his policies, more than anything the results were down to the Democrats having fielded weak candidates and low voter turnout.
That Virginia got duped is in no doubt. I’m someone who’s long judged books by covers, and I’ve been right on that accord more than I’ve been wrong. I had George Bush pegged as the failed, obnoxious frat boy he turned out to be, and I saw McDonnell quickly for the plastecene poor man’s Ted Haggard with the Stepford wife and requisite number of kids. He had a ready smile and the eyes of a fundamentalist. The minute the Washington Post published a picture of him campaigning under the Confederate flag, alarm bells should have gone off in the minds of every registered Democrat and Independent in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Two months after that, in August 2009, WaPo again scored by publishing extracts from McDonnell’s doctoral thesis, obtained at Pat Robertson’s Regent University – which is a euphemism for advanced Bible school. This was the infamous thesis consigning women to a future of being barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen and deploring the existence of homosexuals in society.
If alarm bells didn’t ring with the Confederate flag, they should have been blaring at that moment, and they should have turned into a cacophany when McDonnell told a bare-faced lie and attributed such writings to the folly of youth. That, upon investigation, it turned out that such ideas had been committed to print when McDonnell was a man of 35, married and with children, begs the question: When exactly does youth end and emotional maturity begin?
When McDonnell signed the nefarious document, proclaiming April “Confederate History Month” without as much as referring to the question of slavery being the ultimate driving force behind the Civil War, he not only made Virginia, the first English colony, the Mother of Presidents, and the home of the writers of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, the laughing stock of the entire nation, he also condemned all her citizens to be judged by his standards.
Reading comments on various threads in Facebook and Huffington Post, I now realise that, as a Virginian, I’m supposed to be ignorant, dumb, illiterate, gun-loving, retrospective, fundamentalist Christian, a rube, a hillbilly, a ‘goober’, a dolt, a member of the great unwashed. Also, as a Virginian, according to some, I am a racist. My state, along with the entire South, should secede. In fact, the Union should have allowed us to secede in 1861. Indeed, the United States would have been much, much better and the Confederacy would have been (in one commentator’s words), “the stinking shitheap that it is today.”
Gee, thanks.
It’s nice to be loved.
So love, in fact, that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, both, came in for some pretty strong invective, as did former governors Tim Kaine and Douglass Wilder. Kaine’s condemnation of McDonnell, according to the erstwhile sitting atop the hill of moral superiority, didn’t go far enough. Well, how “far enough” is far enough? Kaine’s tenure as Governor ended three months ago. He condemned the action. He deplored it.
Wilder, on the other hand, fared worse.
It’s entirely mete to know that Douglass Wilder, in 1989, a Democrat, became the first African American elected to a gubernatorial post in the United States. That’s right, peeps. Virginia, that bastion of bigotry and racial prejudice, that ignorant heap of shitkickers, elected the first African American governor in 1989 – almost two decades before David Paterson was appointed and at a time Derval Patrick was just getting into young fatherhood. But when Governor Wilder – today, the Mayor of Richmond – condemned McDonnell’s actions, in the words of a Buffalo woman, transplanted to Virginia and unhappy there, Wilder was a “Republican tool.”
Am I angry about McDonnell? In the words of a well-known sage, you betcha. I’m chewing nails and spitting rust. I was even angrier when I read the account of his actions in The Richmond Times Despatch, a paper long known for its conservative stance, who roundly condemned this governor’s actions; but I was angrier at the degree of support he seemed to receive from the commentators participating in the online version of the paper.
There was a veritable Civil War going on there, and it was getting pretty ugly. Then I read some of the comments again. Many of them began with “My great-grandfather fought in the War of Southern Aggression …”
That’s when I realised something.
These people are old. When you’re great-granddaddy fought for the South, you are old. Maybe some of these men even remembered Great-grandpappy. And there’s no reason why they wouldn’t be computer-literate, themselves. There is such a demographic as silver surfers. Of course, they were arguing the moot point about the War not being about slavery, but about states’ rights etc; but the ultimate truth was that the War was fought because the Southern states demanded their right to extend slavery into the new Western territories, by manifest destiny, whilst the Federal government’s attitude of the day was to contain slavery, as abhorrent as it was, in the agrarian South, and allow all new territories to be slave-free zones.
If you scratch the surface of the United States of the ante-bellum era, you’ll find a lot of unrest amongst certain tranches of Northerners regarding freeing slaves as well. This was a time of western expansion in the United States. It was also the time of unfettered immigration from Europe, chiefly from Germany, Austria and Ireland, to the United States. There was a great anti-immigration feeling amongst people who considered themselves “natural-born” United States citizens, especially in that immigrants provided cheaper labour, and freed slaves would provide even cheaper labour.
I recognise, as well, that simmering beneath the surface of these elderly gentlemen’s righteous indignation, was consternation at the fact that a black man was sitting in the Oval Office.
Well, that’s also the modus operandi of the Tea Party movement, something which is now spreading its tentacles nationwide, North and South, East and West. It’s subtly hidden, of course, but we saw it in the Northern crowds who turned up to cheer Sarah Palin during the Presidential campaign, carrying stuffed Curious George toys, re-named “Hussein” for the occasion. Their poster boys and chief cheerleaders are the likes of Palin, herself, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh … and none of the above is remotely Southern.
It’s an ageing demographic who can’t get to grips with the changing overall racial portrait of the United States. It’s nice to think that this generation is dying off, but experience has proven that attitudes and mores can be passed from one generation to another. In Britain, people whose parents weren’t even alive during the Second World War are raised to detest the Germans. The English cordially hate the French and vice versa based on a war that ended in the Fifteenth Century, and don’t even start on Catholics and Protestants. So, regrettably, there will always be people who think that the Caucasian race is superior to any other. Some of those people, invariably, will be from the South. And some will be from the North, too, which has seen its share of race riots, conveniently forgotten in this diatribe against a state.
For the record, here are a few things people in the North and the South should know:-
First of all, for all you Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy, this one’s for you. They guys’ hero is John S Mosby, the Gray Ghost, himself. Quite a few SCV chapters are named after him. The gals all love Belle Boyd, the famous Southern spy. Literally all the UDC chapters bear Belle’s name. Well, I’m well familiar with Mosby and Belle, having grown up amongst their old stomping ground. I wonder how many people know that Mosby, after the war, became a staunch Republican (bad word in the South in those days) and ended up serving the Grant Administration. That’s Grant as in Ulysses S Grant, who took Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
And Belle escaped to England during the war and married a Yankee en route – not just any Yankee, but a serving Yankee officer. And when he died, she married another; and years later, a third. She made her living post-war, much the same way Sarah Palin’s making hers today – giving public talks, for which she was paid, mostly to veterans of the GAR – that’s the Grand Army of the Republic, to novices, a euphemism for the Yankee army. So Belle was the Sarah Palin of her day, a fully paid-up media whore, who had a heart attack and died in Wisconsin before a scheduled address to another group of Yankee veterans.
In other words, for them the Civil War ended in 1865. They accepted the fact that they were on the losing side and went on to make capital from it.
Secondly, as there seems to be a plethora of people from the North intent on heaping hate on the South, and on Virginia, in particular for this incident, I’d say this: that these people are the selfsame ones who, previously, had been found heaping the hate on the President and all who surround him, calling for a primary challenger in 2012, threatening not to vote, calling him a Republican and all sorts. These people seriously need to deal with their cognitive dissonance, and not substitute it for irrational hate for a specific demographic. These people seriously need to remember that three of the last four Democratic Presidents were from the Deep South, and one was responsible for two of the most Progressive pieces of legislation in the 20th Century. In fact, of the 8 Democratic Presidents to serve in the 20th and 21st Centuries, four were Southerners and one was from a border state. Think about that.
Also, cogitate upon this: Bob McDonnell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. True, he moved to Virginia when he was one year old, but he was an army brat. He spent the early part of his childhood on army bases in Germany, before returning with his parents to settle in Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, or NoVa. Like another Philadelphian, Chris Matthews, he’s a practicing Roman Catholic.
Virginians are born not made. We tolerate people who live and work in our state as “Virginians” inasmuch as they contribute to the economy, but a real Virginian is one who is born there, or – at the very least – one whose mother was a Virginian. Sorry, if that sounds snooty, snobby or exclusive, but in the words of a fellow real Virginina, Bruce Hornsby, “That’s just the way it is.” We just about extended the status of “real Virginian” to Tim Kaine, because he married a woman, from Virginia, whose parents are not only real Virginians, but whose father was actually a real Republican governor of the state (as opposed to Dixiecrat-turned-Republican), who became a Democrat.
And settling in NoVa gives McDonnell the added epithet of being a “phoney Virginian,” which is what residents of that area are considered by people born in the State. So, lil’Bob, like his crony Ken Cuccinelli, bona fide scion of the Jersey shore, are what the Sons of Confederate Veterans and their ilk would have deemed, in other times, to be Carpetbaggers. In fact, as political pundit (and Virginian) Larry Sabato pointed out, McDonnells ancestors were still in Ireland when the Civil War occurred. If they were in the United States, chances were that they were conscripted to serve the Union.
Is Bob McDonnell racist? I don’t know. Probably so, I would say; but I would venture to say that that perceived racism came as much from his own background – remember Jack Murtha’s remark about racism in Pennsylvania? – as from any time spent in Virginia or any association with Virginians.
So, all you people up there on the moral high ground want to shut up and think about what you’re saying when you’re labelling Southerners – and Virginians, in particular in this instance – mindless morons, bigots, hillbillies, whatever – that you’re sounding just as intolerant, narrow-minded and exclusive as those people you seek to criticize on the Right. A friend of mine, an ardent liberal and real Virginian, whom I’ve known through high school and university, recently that the one group of people whom liberals/Progressives could criticize, taunt and condemn with impugnity were Southerners, and in doing so, they totally negated the fact that there were, indeed, liberal Southerners, from Huey Long to Ann Richards, from Lyndon Johnson to Jimmy Carter, from Bill Clinton to Robert Gibbs, the Alabamian Press Secretary who works for the nation’s first African American President.
So, maybe we should all be thankful for Bob McDonnell, because he’s opened up the can of worms labelled “racism,” and – as someone said in the early days of the Obama Presidency – maybe it’s time that this nation sat down and actually addressed racism in an open and honest debate. Maybe Virginia needed McDonnell, because his retrograde opinions on race, women’s issues and sexuality will force those people who couldn’t move their asses to the polling booth in 2009 to mosey on down there and pull the lever for progress in 2010 and thus move the state forwards into the 21st Century in spite of Bob McDonnell. And maybe the whole country needs him too, if only to show those recalcitrants what the people are left with, when others decide to sulk out the vote.
I am a born Virginina Progressive, and I approve this message.

Message from a Snob to the Rest of You

I am a Virginian. My mother was a Virginian, and so was her father. His family came to the colonies out of necessity and choice. During the English Civil War in the 1640s, my ever-so-many-great grandfather backed the losing horse (thus, establishing a long tradition in my family): King Charles I.

Years before this little altercation started, the King had given my ancestor a rather large tract of land in the new colony – not that my ancestor ever bothered to go check it out, you understand. He was pretty cosy with the life he had in Halifax, in the North of England. But then the Civil War started, and the King lost his head – literally – and my ancestor was faced with a choice: stick around and lose his head (and land and everything else) or get ye the hell out to the colonies.

(Even though my family aren’t the greatest gamblers in the world, we do have a reasonable modicum of common sense and a desire for survival).

So, that’s how Virginian I am. I couldn’t be more Virginian if I were Poca-bloody-hontas (and one of her granddaughters married into my ancestor’s family), so I’m entitled to a reasonable amount of snobbism … or rather, that pejorative synonym for it: elitism.

It is as a bona fide elitist from that most elite of the original 13 colonies, I would like to address the matter of why the Democratic candidate for governor from the Commonwealth of Virginia lost in November 2009, because a lot of netroots know-it-all HuffPo dittoes, in their infinite misinformed and discombabulated thinking, have ascertained the reason of Creagh Deeds’ s defeat incorrectly.

Put simply: Y’all are WRONG!

First of all, Bob McDonnell was not ”widely popular” as some people regularly claim in HuffPo land. If anything, most logical voters viewed him suspiciously, as someone who ran as a moderate appeaser, but who had the shifty eyes of an arch-conservative in waiting to dismantle every Progressive piece of legislation enacted by the outgoing Governor, Tim Kaine.

When he appeared on the campaign trail at various times under the Confederate flag, hackles were raised along Democratic spines in alarm. The publication of ueber-regressive philosophies written in his doctoral thesis from a glorified Bible-school sent everyone’s mindset into overdrive at the regressive and repressive attitude he exhibited toward women and women’s rights. That McDonnell slickly - he exudes an image of slime trailing in his wake – excused these sentiments as a folly of youth wasn’t lost amongst the more discerning voter.

When, exactly, does “youth” end? McDonnell was expressing these beliefs as a man of 35, when the thesis was written!!!

Nope. McDonnell appealed to Sarah Palin’s ”real Virginians,” the rural residents along the south-central corridor, extending into the mountainous westside of the state – people like the Wise County constituents, dependent on travelling medical charities for their healthcare. Sarah offered him her expert campaigning skills, and he turned her down. That, it seems, was a political stroke of sheer genius.

These were the people who couldn’t reconcile themselves to the specter of a black man in the White House.

He then turned his attention to the Socialist Communist People’s Democratic Republic of Northern Virginia (so dubbed by Joe McCain, foul-mouthed brother of Senator John), subtly reminding all and sundry that he, Bob McDonnell, came from the Northern Virginia area.

As if that mattered.

It didn’t because – and here’s the rub – the election was won by McDonnell as much as because of who didn’t vote as who did. And it was also lost, I’m sorry to say, because the Democratic Party endorsed the wrong man as candidate.

Creagh Deeds is a lovely man, but he was little known throughout the state as a whole. He was chosen by the Democratic voters from a field that included Terry McAuliffe (the high-profile Clinton operative) and Brian Moran, the brother of the popular and Progressive 8th District Congressman. McAuliffe came with the tag “Carpetbagger” (a term that still carries images of Yankees marching through the Shenandoah), and Moran, like his brother, was viewed as too far to the Left. That left Deeds a nice compromise candidate – nice, being the operative word.

Mr Nice proceeded to run one of the most negative campaigns in recent history.

That was a big mistake.

The other big mistake was simply that Virginia voters traditionally don’t turn out in droves to elect a governor. The winner of the prize can only serve one four-year term, and then he goes. The voters are savvy enough to realise that the fella in the Big Chair will only work for the first two years and then phone in for the final two, because he’ll be busy raising campaign funds for his US Senate candidacy that will take place immediately he leaves office (Chuck Robb, Macaca Allen, Mark Warner et al). Most people don’t bother voting, considering that they’ll probably be voting for whomever in four years’ time in a senatorial campaign, so McDonnell appealed to the people he knew had a vested interest in voting.

To the goobers in the rural Southern part of the state, he was the white man who’d stand up to the one who had no right to sit in the Oval Office; and to the independents, he could put hand on heart and claim to be a fiscal conservative. He rightly calculated that most of the people who didn’t vote, would be Democrats anyway, lazily complacent, and he wasn’t wrong.

First, that particular demographic which carried Obama in the state did a no-show: the college kids. Why should they? They’d participated in the ‘big one’, the Party party. They’d canvassed and registered voters and campaigned door-o-door. They’d participated in history. Now they were having a voter hangover, or they were studying for mid-terms, or both.

Either way, they didn’t show; or they couldn’t be bothered to do so. They simply couldn’t be bothered to vote for a greying, middle-aged man with a stutter, where they’d turned out in droves for a greying, middle-aged celebrity with a teleprompter.

The other demographic that won the state for Obama failed to show as well – the African American community. In fact, they were divided, with some high profiled African American Virginians, actually, endorseing McDonnell (e.g., the divine Doug Wilder, first African American governor of any state.)

So most of the African American community stayed home too.

Statistics show that in any given election, the lower the voter turnout, the more chance a Republican or an incumbent will prevail. This is exactly what happened.

And as for this being an indictment of Obama’s shortcomings as a President, after less than one year, that’s a fallacy too. In almost every voting precinct in the state, exit polls amongst independents, who voted for McDonnell, showed that the reason they voted Republican had nothing to do with President Obama’s freshman year performance and everything to do with what they perceived to be a shoddily-run campaign on the part of the Democratic candidate. In fact, almost to a person, these voters said that they wouldn’t hesitate to vote for Obama again, as President.

As Walter Cronkite and – even better – that real Virginian Bruce Hornsby would say, “That’s just the way it is” – unfortunate, coincidental, but true.

I am just pissed off and sick and tired of self-appointed pundits in the blogosphere attempting to use this election as a rod with which to beat the President; and if that conjures up images of Simon Legree or Ole Massa beatin’ the field hands, good. I want it to show that.

Because the people making the loudest wailings about the Virginia result (and, to a degree, the New Jersey one and the Massachusetts one) are the same adolescently-inclined people who are threatening to sulk out the vote in 2010 or 2012 or who are whining for some whiter than white (literally) Progressive saviour to descend from secular heaven in the form of Howard Dean or Denis Kucinich and mount a primary challenge against the President. They’re the same people demanding that the President fire his team of advisors, including his Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Treasury and hire a whole new entourage of their own choosing – said entourage to include, again, Howard Dean and Denis Kucinich, as well as Eliot Spitzer and Elizabeth Warren.

They’re are the political innocents, mischief makers and miscreants who proclaim themselves Progressives, far superior in intellect, tolerance, open-mindedness and understanding than the Bible-bashing, gun-totin’ Republican Right, yet they want various Rightwing commentators/politicians ’silenced’; they ban any adverse comment on certain Progressive aggregates, whilst preaching the First Amendment. When they’re told the truth by anyone in a position to know better, they either effect selective deafness or they’re arrogant enough to deem the truth a lie.

So the salutory lesson in all of this is simply this: look at what happens when you decide, for whatever reason, not to vote in an election. The fox gets in the henhouse and all hell breaks loose. McDonnell and his merry men have unleased a war against their LGBT constituents, after Tim Kaine signed executive order legislation banning any discrimination against anyone based on sexual orientation … and that’s just the start of things to come.

A helluva lot of fuck-ups can happen in four short years. Just look at the damage Bush wreaked!